Multidisciplinary artist Joiri Minaya was born in New York, growing up in the Dominican Republic. Minaya attended the Escuela Nacional de Artes Visuales (ENAV) in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic in 2009, the Altos de Chavón School of Design in La Romana, Dominican Republic in 2011 and Parsons the New School for Design in 2013.

Her work has been exhibited in the Centro de la Imagen in Santo Domingo, El Museo del Barrio, Guttenberg Arts, Rush Arts Gallery, MoCADA, Grace Exhibition Space and Trestle Gallery, among other spaces.

Minaya is the recipient of a 2015 Joan Mitchell Foundation Emerging Artist Grant, a XXV Concurso de Arte Eduardo León Jimenes Great Prize (Centro León in Santiago, Dominican Republic), and the Great Prize of the XXVII National Biennial of the Museum of Modern Art in Santo Domingo. She has participated in the Space and Time Winter Residency at Guttenberg Arts, the Bronx Museum’s AIM Program, NYFA Mentoring Program for Immigrant Artists and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

I’m interested in otherness, self-consciousness and displacement. How historical hierarchies inform and condition current identities. How constructions are received, internalized and then regurgitated by the body. 

I navigate binaries searching for in-betweenness, trying to both fulfill and sabotage expectations at once.

Living between the United State and Dominican Republic has made me aware of my own difference and subjectivity depending on context. My recent works focus on challenging the construction of the female subject in relation to nature and landscape in a “tropical” context, shaped by a foreign Gaze that demands leisure and pleasure.